A nuclear safety inspector discovered only by chance last fall that Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. had continued to dump tens of thousands of gallons of hazardous radioactive waste into the ground for a decade after promising to stop, federal regulators were told yesterday.
Officials at the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission admitted "losing track" of the problem for the last seven years because of staff turnover and poor record keeping.
Commission president Linda Keen told a public hearing here yesterday that the incidents raised questions about the competence of both AECL and the safety commission's officials and that more explanations were needed to get to the bottom of what went wrong.